Faith Campaign

The Return to Faith Campaign, also known as the Faith Campaign, was a campaign of Sunni Islamic religious revival conducted by the Iraqi Ba'ath Party from 1993 to 2003 with the goal of winning the support of Islamists in the country. Previously, the Ba'ath Party had seen Islamism as a backwards ideology, but, in the aftermath of failed Shia and Kurdish uprisings aganst his rule, Ba'athist dictator Saddam Hussein decided to win the support of Sunni Islamists by embarking on a campaign of Islamization; he wished to avoid an Islamist uprising against his rule. Saddam had already added the takbir to the Iraqi flag in 1991 during the Gulf War, and he went on to ban the public sale of alcohol, criminalize public consumption of alcohol, had the Fedayeen Saddam behead women accused of prostitution, made the Quran a core subject for national education, emphasized a general studying of Islam, funded the construction of mosques, and granted freedoms to Islamist groups. The campaign was unpopular among much of the Ba'athist leadership, but Saddam's lieutenant Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri backed and supervised the campaign and used the opportunity to convince many Ba'ath Party leaders to join his Sufi sect of Sunni Islam. By the late 1990s, the growth of Salafism not only helped the Ba'athist regime remain in power, but also assisted the growth of Islamist terror organizations. A low-level terrorist campaign began in the form of car bombings and assassinations, and many security officials sent to infiltrate extremist mosques and organizations instead converted to Salafism. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the fall of Ba'athism, Salafi-Ba'athist former security agents went on to form various insurgent groups which fought against the US-led occupation. A significant number of Salafist former Ba'athists went on to form the senior leadership of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.